| I watched the news conf. this morning. The neutrino production "curve" looks like a a square wave pulse as a function of time ____| |_____ and the detection points look like this ___________________________________| |_____ with ∆t ~= 700km/c time distance between the two pulses. The claim is that the "most likely guess" of the received
pulse shape (obtained from many measurements) is too far right to be consistent with speed of light, but the ∆t measured where? between the onset of the pulses?
between the place where the pulses go down? What they did some mega calculation (maximum likelihood stuff), to predict the best approximation to the shape of the pulse at the receiving end -- so somehow they take on the approximation of the whole pulse (which is much wider than the claimed discrepancy). They should downgrade the claim from: "speed of neutrinos is...." to: "speed of pulses of neutrinos ..... on average, as predicted by the maximum likely shape of the pulse",
which sounds much less profound. The conf was good though, the speaker stood up to a lot of
serious scrutiny. My guess is the problem is with the ML curve shape calculation. |
This would apply to every paper in existence. If you want to know the methodology, you read that section of the paper. Putting it in the title only obscures the message.
It's true that it makes the analysis a lot harder, and one of the questions after the talk was about making shorter bunches of neutrinos. The duration of the pulses are probably just set by the width of the proton bunches in the ring, in which case it would be nontrivial to make it much shorter.